NPR’s 100 Composers Under 40

They write: “A few weeks ago, Q2 and NPR Music launched a crowdsourced project to determine listeners’ favorite composers under the age of 40 — and, by extension, those pieces which were shaping our contemporary musical scene and defining what it means to be a composer in the 21st century. On Facebook, Twitter and the aggregating pages on Q2 and NPR Music, an international array of comments poured in, reaching almost 800 suggestions in total. With much debate and awareness of such a list’s limitations, we’ve narrowed the field down to 100 composers, each represented by one song in a randomized stream on this page…How do you know when you’re hearing a composer? All we can really say, to paraphrase the late Potter Stewart, is: “I know it when I hear it.”